In the disposal of hazardous waste such as radioactive materials, stringent precautions must be taken to guard against spilling or leaking of their containers. Typically, liquid or dry waste materials are stored in standard fifty-five gallon drums the walls of which often experience serious corrosion making them very susceptible to rupturing during handling. Manual handling of such drums can be dangerous to personnel, particularly with radioactive materials, and conventional remote control handling has proved unsatisfactory because of its reliance upon "crab claw" type devices which squeeze the drums about their midsection or between their ends. Such gripping devices entail a high risk of damaging the drums and causing their contents to spill.
It is one of the purposes of this invention to contain the object drum within a salvage overpack steel drum. Such overpacks, as they are hereinafter called, are heavy duty steel cylinders which may contain a special liner resistant to most hazardous materials. The overpacks are not themselves novel, except for a special gasket which may surround the run of their open end as described below, and neither are some of the individual elements of the apparatus of this invention. Thus self-loading vehicles designed to carry cylindrical tanks are taught in U.S. Pat. No. 2,808,948 and handling devices having a lower platform adapted to slide under a load and an upper lid to clamp the load vertically against the platform are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,682,347. However, the prior art neither anticipates nor suggests the overall combination of the drum handling method and apparatus described and claimed herein.